Doctors and nutrition experts tout the benefits of whole grains because they preserve the fiber and nutrients that are stripped away when flour is refined.
Whole grain bread has been popular for years, but chances are that when you stop for a sweet treat at a local bakery, you don’t have many whole grain options.
A new breed of bakery is putting whole grains at the center of their product offerings. That includes a popular spot in Dripping Springs, near Austin.
Micheline Maynard wrote about the trend for Food & Wine. She says some bakers turned to whole grains after the pandemic. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Why are whole grain products growing in popularity among bakeries?
Micheline Maynard: Well, one thing that happened during the pandemic, you might remember, is that everybody got interested in sourdough. And they were growing sourdough starters in their homes and making bread and cookies and muffins.
And kind of coming out of the pandemic, people said, “well, this seems to be healthier. What else is healthier?” And it turns out that whole grain bread and pastries are actually healthier for you. And there is a lot of research from places like the Mayo Clinic that show that they’re actually better for your system.
I mentioned that whole grain bakery in Central Texas, a place called Abby Jane, which is in Dripping Springs. Tell us about it.
So Abby Jane bakery is owned by a woman named Abby Love and she actually started her bakery five years ago. And when she started her bakery, people would come in and go “wait a minute, this looks burned. It’s too dark.’ It doesn’t look like croissants and French bread that people were buying.
But she had an education effort that went on and she’s kind of gotten people used to what whole grains look and taste. And now she has lines out the door for her chocolate chip cookies and her baguettes and croissants and she told me that she’s selling hundreds of loaves of bread a day and sometimes hundreds an hour.
That is wild. How much of a one-off is is Abby Jane from what you can tell?
I don’t think it’s a fad because when I was doing my research in my article for Food & Wine, I asked some other food writers for suggestions and I was flooded with suggestions of whole grain bakeries in places like Portland and San Francisco and Chicago — and obviously right there outside of Austin and over in the Phoenix area.
And it turns out that it’s kind of a movement. It isn’t going to be wildly popular across all bakeries. And one reason is that these whole grain flours, which are whole wheat and rye and spelt, they’re more expensive than refined white flour.
So it is kind of a specialty thing, but it’s definitely not a fad and it’s definitely available if you know where to look.
You mentioned the price. How much of a price difference are we talking about here? Is there any way you can describe that?
Yeah, we’re talking about a pretty significant price difference, because, you know, if you go on the HEB website, or you go to look at other supermarket websites, you can get a big bag of white flour for not a whole lot of money — I mean, $3 or $4. And some of the whole grains can cost $7 and up for a bag of flour.
But essentially, you’re getting literally what they call the “whole grains.” There’s three parts to a grain of wheat or a grain of one of these grains. And they throw away two of them to make refined flour. But when you buy whole grain flour, you get the whole thing.
When we talk about something like this, where there are premium prices but you’re getting a premium product, I always think of what happened with coffee, wine, craft beer… Of course, that’s a big part of Texas Hill Country commerce. And I’m wondering if we’re starting to see something like that here with whole grain bakeries.
Well, I think that’s a very good analogy and a lot of people are just fine with going to the store and getting a loaf of white bread and toasting it up and using it. But other people, especially if you’re on any of these GLP-1 drugs, they basically kind of limit what you can eat per day. And so people are saying, “if I can only eat one slice of toast, I want it to be really good hearty toast.”
And I think that’s just happening across a lot of people. They’re looking at what they eat and how much they can eat and kind of deciding, OK, well, I think I want something hearty in quality versus, you know, something I kind of chew and swallow.
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